From the moment we see the black back of a slick-haired head emerge from some dank, concrete womb into a paper-laden wasteland in the opening scene, we know director-writer Andrew Dominik is going for more than your average genre gangster flick.

He’s actually hitting us over the head with a modern metaphor for the crumbling American dream. It’s impossible to ignore the underlying gong of social injustice beneath the gritty surface of his new movie Killing Them Softly because the screenplay practically screams “political allegory!”

Not only is there a TV with a talking head in the corner of practically every scene, mostly featuring then-Presidential candidate Barack Obama delivering a message of hope to a public still reeling under the policies of George W. Bush and the crash of 2008.

Dominik also packs this picture with endless shots of rundown strip malls, empty upscale hotels and characters that are barely surviving in the urban decay of daily existence.

After giving us a looming silhouette of Pitt, a mob enforcer who’s in town to clean up, we enter a perfectly seedy storefront run by Squirrel (Vincent Curatola) — a dry cleaner with a few dirty tricks up his freshly starched sleeve.

Squirrel thinks he’s got the perfect score: An illicit card game on the other side of town run by Markie Trattman (Ray Liotta). A few years ago, Markie saw all the cash around the table and figured he could grab the moolah by hiring two thugs with guns. He told everyone some other mobster must have done it.

Squirrel figures if it ever happened again, everyone would have no choice but to peg the blame on Markie, so he hires two thugs of his own to pull off the heist.

One of the hired hands seems to have his act together. Frankie (Scoot McNairy) knows he’s just a small potato, and it’s his intelligent understanding of the criminal pecking order that draws us to his oily hair and crooked-toothed grin.

The other accomplice is Russell (Ben Mendelsohn), an Aussie junkie with a very bad attitude and a perpetually ignited libido. Russell isn’t as smart or together as Frankie, and this inevitably prompts a nagging sensation of doubt as we wait for the whole heist to delaminate.

That’s pretty much the bulk of the narrative content in this bleak study of Middle America – a place that looks largely abandoned and derelict, and where the streets are constantly covered with a sooty coat of rain.

The whole mood is post-apocalyptic. Everything appears to be rotting, peeling or simply rusting into nothing, which lends every single scene a sense of jaundiced pathos – and perhaps even elevates Dominik’s film to the level of art, if only from a purely esthetic perspective.

Whether Killing Me Softly is real art, or just a grotesque piece of stylized violence with big stars looking flawed and human remains something of a critical mystery because the movie offers no emotional flashpoint.

Moving back and forth through time without announcing exactly where we are at any given moment, Dominik lets us sink into the sweaty milieu and watch a group of largely unlikable characters circle the drain.

This is a lot more fun than it sounds, because Dominik encourages a certain sense of moral outrage by ensuring every frame is steeped in spiritual bankruptcy. By stripping the characters of any heroic dimension, the viewer can rejoice every time something awful happens to one of the perfectly awful people.

And Killing Them Softly has plenty of awful to go around. Dominik even slows down the action down to surreal, glacier speeds in certain spots. One execution shows the bullets breaking the car window, piercing the victim’s hand and finally entering the skull over the course of several elongated seconds.

The result is something that is both poetic and repulsive in equal measure, which describes the movie as a whole: A push-pull eulogy to the old-fashioned heart of American culture as embodied by the free entrepreneur mobster.

Pitt plays our dark touchstone: The old-school guy trapped in a changing world. His character still believes in the old ways, where you let people die with dignity for a good price. Yet, over the course of the film, he has to negotiate with a corporate suit (Richard Jenkins) about how to proceed.

Indeed, even the criminal syndicates process actuarial risk in these modern times, and rubbing someone out just doesn’t pay like it used to, forever changing the iconic role of the gun for hire.

It’s interesting that Dominik chose a modern-age crime story as his follow-up to The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford, his period western starring Pitt in the title role of James.

In a sense, this is a bookend of the frontier story, where the mighty gunslinger is underbid by offshore, unskilled labour or diminished and redundant as a result of ethical ambivalence.

Dominik puts the whole works under a magnifying glass and starts frying the ants one by one. Yes, it’s horrible fun, but thanks to some absolutely rock solid performances from the entire cast, this human comedy over-wrapped in dirty socks and bloody bandages may also prompt real feeling.

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